Friday, April 13, 2012

Safety of Sri Aurobindian anchorage

Europeans
and Americans began to go to liberated South Asia
in droves in the 1960′s to study these traditions firsthand. And in the
process, many discovered the sheer variety of traditions, for none of those
described above ever fully went away, there were always living fossils of
previous forms. In a land of 800 languages, and over 800 million people, and a
thriving oral tradition to this day which operates in tandem to written print
culture, it is unlikely that it would be otherwise.

But
it is only in the last forty years or so that the true diversity of Indic
thought is being explored. And this is hardly surprising, since so much
Euro-American scholarship is still influenced strongly by the legacies of
colonialism, from the work of early “orientalist” scholars to the often
radically oversimplifying romanticizing western acolytes of the 1960′s.]

No
one can delve into this diverse narrative during his lifetime, and hence, the safe
course is to specialize in its essence as distilled by The Mother & Sri
Aurobindo. One may take up the intellectual route in the beginning, but if it
is not transformed into the religious or the devotional over a period of time,
then much of what they say or choose to convey concurrently will be missing. Besides,
they have also stated that study of their works constitutes a living
collaboration with the ongoing evolution of the earth. Thus, it’s a choice between
going back to the old contradictions and participating in molding the future.
[TNM55]